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Amid Ruined New Orleans Neighborhoods, a Gadfly Buzzes

Karen Gadbois,a New Orleans activist, has helped expose corruption within a federally funded program designed to help rebuild the city.Credit
Lee Celano for The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS — The citizens of this scarred city have grown accustomed to promises of grand official projects that will infallibly transform life here but somehow never do. Their attention is diminishing.

But not in the case of Karen Gadbois. She jumps in her car and checks up on the promises, driving for hours across the city, then blogs about the results on her kitchen table while her dogs yap around her. A few months ago, she discovered a city renovation program that was not actually fixing up houses.

That activism might normally go down as well-meaning naïveté. Here though, it can be incendiary, in a place where big public funds slosh around, citizen needs are still great at Hurricane Katrina’s three-year anniversary and City Hall’s grasp of its own initiatives is shaky.

In fact, it has set off a bomb that has exploded in slow motion here in the past three weeks, largely thanks to Ms. Gadbois: the federally financed program to gut and repair the storm-damaged homes of the poor and elderly, on which the city spent $1.8 million, has been exposed as — at least partly — a sham.

The F.B.I. on Monday raided the agency running the program, the local United States attorney announced last week he was investigating, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin, hauled grudgingly before the City Council, complained about what he called “amateur investigations,” a reluctant nod to Ms. Gadbois and her followers in the news media.

The classic New Orleans blend of possible corruption and certain mismanagement has dominated headlines for days, forcing Mr. Nagin to do an abrupt about-face. First, he called a news conference to criticize a New Orleans television reporter, Lee Zurik, whom he called “reckless,” for following up on Ms. Gadbois’s discoveries in a report on WWL-TV.

Mr. Nagin made it clear he was not pleased with the report, especially because it was broadcast when a high-level Congressional delegation was in town. With the cameras rolling, he said it was “completely untrue” that federal money had been misspent on work never done.

“It’s got to stop,” the mayor ordered the reporter at a news conference, referring to what he called “the gotcha mode,” and accusing the reporter of hurting the city’s recovery. The charge is akin in New Orleans to being accused of a lack of patriotism.

On Thursday, though, in front of the City Council, the mayor acknowledged through gritted teeth that there were “documentation issues” and “discrepancies” in the remediation program, which is run by the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corporation, known as NOAH.

The problems, however, appear to surpass the mayor’s descriptions.

Taking their cues from Ms. Gadbois, WWL and The Times-Picayune have documented business connections between the program’s former director, Stacey Jackson, and some of its contractors, one of whom was the mayor’s brother-in-law. The reports showed houses that were supposedly fixed up at the taxpayers’ expense but in fact were untouched, contractors who billed the city for gutting work that was actually done by church volunteers, “remediated” houses that were then demolished and poor and elderly residents mystified at turning up on the city’s list of those supposedly helped. Some of the houses did not belong to the poor and the elderly at all, but were actually owned by businessmen or landlords.

It helped that Ms. Gadbois is an outsider, an energetic relative newcomer from Boston — she came here in 2002 — with a professed love for the city that easily outpaces the resignation of more established residents.

So it was that she paid attention when, late in 2006, the mayor talked up a new city program to help the poor and the elderly pay for gutting, cleaning up and if necessary boarding up their storm-damaged houses.

It seemed to mark a change from mere demolitions, “the default policy position,” Ms. Gadbois said, and one that angers her. Besides, she said, “our first impetus was, we want to see a program that works,” a motivation more experienced residents might have counseled against as quixotic.

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But Ms. Gadbois has a dangerous affection for the city’s shotgun houses and Creole cottages in a place where so much is falling down. She is the daughter of a plaster lather — a textile artist herself, and wife of a painter — and she cannot let the sagging porches and ragged cornices go. They have turned her into a full-time activist.

Lists of homes to which things are going to be done — there are many in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, where nearly 60 percent of the dwellings were damaged in the storm — are red meat for Ms. Gadbois. But this time she did not even need to leave her own house, a rambling, cheerfully messy raised green cottage in the Carrollton section (it took on four feet of water in the hurricane) to know something was terribly wrong with the list of houses NOAH claimed to work on.

“It wasn’t even that the house didn’t exist; the whole block didn’t exist,” Ms. Gadbois recalled. “Something’s not right here. We saw properties that had supposedly been remediated by NOAH coming up to be declared imminent health threats, and then demolished.”

It galled her, she said, that public money was being used to rehab a house, and later to demolish it, often by agencies sharing the same office space.

But it was actually worse once Ms. Gadbois got in the car with her colleague, Sarah Lewis, and started to look at the houses NOAH was supposed to be working on.

“The first day we went out, there were 10 properties, and they were just not done,” she said — nothing had been done to them, even though they were listed by the city as remediated. Photographs of some posted on her Web site look ready for the wrecking ball rather than an all-clear inspection certificate. In the end, she inspected several hundred houses: only a few had actually been remediated.

“We thought: this is bigger than us,” she said.

The baton has now been handed off to federal authorities, who have interviewed Ms. Gadbois and Ms. Lewis about their findings.

Mr. Nagin last week said the city had been unable to “substantiate” any work on “90 properties” on a list of 870 — a number that falls well short of what the activists found.

“The record-keeping, we’re finding, with NOAH, is not that good,” Mr. Nagin said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid Ruined New Orleans Neighborhoods, a Gadfly Buzzes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe